The Students Who Leave

Pritiraj BrahmaFounding Partner, Pritiraj & Partners · 27 August 2026

Departures for study abroad fell from about 8.94 lakh in 2023 to 6.26 lakh in 2025 — a fall produced by visa policy in four other countries, not by anything India did. Asked what these students spend, the government told Parliament it does not maintain the information. Four foreign campuses now operate here under two regulators, and neither publishes what any of them enrolled.

ProvenancePublished 27 August 2026. Departure figures are from Bureau of Immigration data as tabled in the Lok Sabha (29 July 2024) and the Rajya Sabha (reported February 2026); the two sources give different figures for 2023 and both are stated. The stock of students abroad is from a Ministry of External Affairs reply of December 2024. Remittance figures are from the RBI's Liberalised Remittance Scheme series for May 2025. First-year enrolment at foreign branch campuses is from reported compilations, not an official UGC or IFSCA release, and is described as such.

In 2023, 8,94,783 Indians left the country recording study as their purpose of travel. In 2025 the figure was 6,26,000 — a fall of about 31 per cent in two years. Every material cause of that fall was a decision taken in Ottawa, London, Washington or Canberra. Asked in Parliament what these students spend, the education department replied that it does not maintain the information. India's largest annual export of human capital is measured by verbal disclosure at an immigration counter.

The outflow is usually argued as a loss-of-talent story or a foreign-exchange story. It is neither, primarily. It is a measurement story, and the measurement failure is what makes every subsequent policy argument unwinnable — including the case for the branch campuses now being built to reverse it.

Five findings anchor this analysis:

1. The outflow rose steeply for a decade, then fell sharply for reasons outside India. Bureau of Immigration figures tabled in the Lok Sabha on 29 July 2024 give the series: 3,69,876 in 2016; 5,18,787 in 2018; 5,87,313 in 2019; 2,60,363 in the pandemic year 2020; 7,50,365 in 2022; 8,94,783 in 2023. A Rajya Sabha reply reported in February 2026 recorded 7.70 lakh in 2024 and more than 6.26 lakh in 2025. The proximate causes are documented destination-side measures: Canada's study permit cap from January 2024, the United Kingdom's bar on dependants for taught master's students from the same month, and a sharp rise in United States student visa refusals.
2. The two official series do not agree, and the government says so about its own method. The 2023 figure is 8,94,783 in the July 2024 Lok Sabha reply and about 9.08 lakh in the Rajya Sabha reply reported in February 2026; the 2022 figure appears as both 7,50,365 and 7,52,111 across replies. The ministry's own caveat, given in Parliament in 2023, is that there is no index for capturing the category of Indians going abroad for higher education, and that purpose is recorded manually from a traveller's verbal disclosure or from the visa type presented at immigration clearance. This is not a criticism of the officials who compile it. It is a description of an instrument being asked to do a job it was not built for.
3. Flow and stock are different numbers, and only the flow is discussed. The Minister of State for External Affairs told the Rajya Sabha in December 2024 that 13,35,878 Indian students were pursuing higher studies abroad, across 108 countries. Departures in a given year are a fraction of the population already outside. Policy aimed at this year's applicants leaves the standing 13 lakh untouched, and no published series tracks how many of them return, when, or into what.
4. The money is not measured either. Asked whether Indian spending on foreign education exceeded a national budget line, the education ministry replied that it does not maintain this information. The only official proxy is the Reserve Bank's Liberalised Remittance Scheme series — remittances for studies abroad were $149.8 million in May 2025, down about 29 per cent year on year. The LRS, introduced in 2004 and now permitting $250,000 per resident per financial year, captures only what flows through that channel: not education loans disbursed abroad, not fees paid by relatives resident overseas, not living costs earned in the destination country. It is a genuine indicator of direction. It is not a measure of magnitude, and it is routinely reported as though it were.
5. The inbound leg has a legal architecture and no published enrolment series at all. The UGC's regulations for foreign higher educational institutions were notified on 8 November 2023; GIFT City campuses operate instead under the IFSCA regulations of 2022. Deakin University opened at GIFT City in July 2024 and the University of Wollongong in November 2024; the University of Southampton opened at Gurugram in August 2025 as the first campus under the mainland UGC route, and UNSW Sydney's Bengaluru campus followed in August 2026. Four campuses, two regulators, three years — and neither regulator publishes what any of them enrolled. The one inbound number that is published has not moved: AISHE recorded roughly 46,800 foreign students in Indian institutions in 2021-22, against about 46,000 in 2017-18.

What the branch campus can and cannot do

The branch campus is a serious instrument and the policy deserves better than either boosterism or dismissal. What it can do is offer a recognised foreign degree at a fraction of the cost of relocation, remove the visa risk that now dominates household decisions, and — over time — put internationally competitive teaching practice inside the Indian market where domestic institutions must compete with it. Southampton's Gurugram campus is a genuine first: a top-100 university operating in India under Indian regulation, awarding its own degree.

What it cannot do, at present scale, is address the outflow. Six lakh departures a year against four campuses in their first cohorts is not a substitution. Enrolment figures for those campuses circulate through published compilations and run to a few hundred in total; we do not treat them as evidence, because no regulator has authenticated them, and a three-year-old policy should not be judged on numbers nobody has stood behind. That the figures have to be sourced this way is the finding. Nor can the branch campus address the deeper asymmetry: a student leaving for Canada or Germany is buying a labour market and a migration pathway as much as a degree, and a Gurugram campus of a British university sells the degree without the pathway. That is a legitimate product. It is not the same product.

There is also a straightforward regulatory untidiness worth naming. Campuses inside GIFT City are approved and supervised under IFSCA's 2022 regulations; campuses everywhere else under the UGC's 2023 regulations. Two frameworks, two supervisors, one category of institution, at the moment when the category is being established. India has been here before, with tribunals, with land records, and with the private universities examined earlier in this series: the moment to align supervisory architecture is while there are four institutions, not forty.

The counter-case

Three arguments cut against treating the outflow as a problem at all.

First, the fall is not a policy success and should not be claimed as one — but it is also not evidence of failure. At 6.26 lakh, the 2025 outflow remains above the pre-pandemic 2019 baseline of 5.87 lakh. The market has re-priced, not collapsed, and destinations such as Germany and Ireland absorbed part of the diversion. Reading the decline as a verdict on Indian higher education mistakes a visa cycle for a quality signal.

Second, student migration is not straightforwardly a loss. It produces remittances, returning skills, and a diaspora that has demonstrably served Indian interests in technology and capital. A country confident in its own institutions does not treat its students' mobility as leakage; the Review has argued consistently that citizens' choices are not a governance failure merely because the state finds them inconvenient.

Third, judging branch campuses on year-one enrolment is unfair. Deakin has been open two years, Southampton one. Every branch campus in every market starts small; the meaningful test is the fourth cohort, not the first.

All three are sound, and the third in particular should temper any conclusion drawn from the enrolment figures above. What none of them answers is the measurement point. If student mobility is a legitimate choice rather than a leak, the state's obligation shifts from preventing it to informing it — and India currently cannot tell a family how many students went where, at what cost, with what completion rate, or how many came home.

What we would do

1. Turn the departure series into a real statistical product. Link the record to visa class rather than to a verbal answer at a counter, publish it annually with destination, level of study and a stated methodology, and reconcile the discrepancies between existing replies openly rather than leaving two official figures for the same year in circulation.
2. Publish a study-abroad cost and outcome report, annually. Fees, living cost and completion rate by major destination, compiled from destination-country published data and Indian bank loan disbursement records. Households are making the largest single financial decision of their lives on the basis of agents' brochures. The state cannot make the decision for them; it can put an honest comparison in front of them, and no other body has the standing to do it.
3. Publish an official inbound register with the same seriousness. Foreign students in Indian institutions by nationality, institution and programme; and for every approved foreign campus, its approval date, approved programmes, fee schedule, sanctioned intake and actual enrolment. If the policy is to be judged, let it be judged on published numbers rather than on compilations.
4. Align the two supervisory frameworks now. One set of standards for entry, quality assurance, fee disclosure, student grievance and exit, applying identically inside and outside GIFT City, whichever body administers it. Four institutions is the cheapest moment this alignment will ever be available.
5. Connect the outflow to the vacancy. India has 13.36 lakh students abroad and, as this series has shown, three in five professorships empty in its central universities. A published, time-bound returnee faculty channel — recognised qualifications, a defined entry route, start-up research support, decided within a stated number of weeks — converts one column of this analysis into the answer to another. It is the single highest-return instrument available in this space, and it requires no new institution.

The students who leave are not the failure. The failure is that India measures them by asking them, at the airport, why they are going.